Matteo Cantiello edited Intro.tex  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 17a38d469e05777c5ce5be6df079e6cbb6bdc183

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A revolution has occurred in the last two decades in the world of astrophysics.   It all started in the mid '90s with the first discovery of new worlds around other stars. The word term  "Extrasolar planet" (or Exoplanet) became widely used to identify planets\footnote{A planet is a celestial body massive enough to be bounded by its self gravity (unlike a rock or an asteroid, that are kept together by electromagnetic forces), but not massive enough to produce energy through nuclear fusion (as stars do)} orbiting a star other than the Sun. %I remember hearing about the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, a giant planet about 50 light years away, on a bus ride to school. I was blown away. That night I could not sleep, my mind racing towards the amazing implications of that discovery. Little I knew that was just the beginning.   As today\footnote{6 February 2014, check \href{http://exoplanets.org/}{exoplanets.org} for the most recent figure} 765 confirmed exoplanets and 3466 exoplanet candidates are known. The most remarkable discoveries came only in the last couple of years thanks to the \href{http://kepler.nasa.gov/}{KEPLER} space telescope. This amazing instrument has been patiently looking for the extremely tiny dimming induced by the passage of a planet in front of its host star, and helped to answer two fundamental questions: